What makes a book club selection good is not the same as what makes a book good. The best book club books are the ones that generate disagreement — not controversy in the cheap sense, but genuine interpretive difference where multiple defensible readings exist.

A book with one obvious interpretation makes for a short meeting. Everyone agrees with the author's apparent intention and then talks about what they had for dinner. A book where some readers found the ending cathartic and others found it sentimental, where the protagonist is either heroic or deluded depending on your reading — that book runs long and produces follow-up texts the next day.

The books I most often suggest for clubs: Never Let Me Go (almost everyone has a different theory about why the characters don't resist), The Remains of the Day (some readers find Stevens pitiable, some find him contemptible, some identify with him), and Piranesi (the pace at which people figure out what's happening varies wildly and it generates its own fascinating conversation).